In the Tennessee Plant
On my first day of a new consulting assignment, I stood atop a stairway overlooking the Tennessee plantâs 420,000 square foot shop floor and some 400 hundred employees, except for the 20 percent or so who didnât show up on any given day. Seeing it all, I silently asked myself: I wonder what the heck goes on in here? My answer was: I have no idea. However, as a saying goes, if you really want to understand something, try to change it. Sure enough, as new leaders arrived and a continuous improvement program progressed, I would learn a lot about the plantâs work, its problems, its culture, and about the new paradigm of leadership required to transform a traditional Western factory into a Toyota-style lean operation.
The Tennessee auto-parts plantâs lean transformation was led by two successive plant managers, a former union president, a Japanese sensei, along with his cadre of American lean consultants, and was supported by a committed vice president who set the direction and paid the bills. After a few years, the plantâs once-disengaged workforce, one that corporate staffers had privately derided as a bunch of âshade tree mechanics,â had become motivated to learn and able to operate a world-class factory.
Whatâs the Problem to Solve?
Western executives, plant managers, and value stream managers have spent three decades and untold resources trying to start and sustain Toyota-style lean production in their business operations. Yet despite small-scale successes, the consensus of leaders, authors, and lean experts is that after an initial burst of enthusiasm, less than 10 percent of lean value stream startups sustain their initial promise.
Why so?
Due to minimal staffing, synchronized timing, reliance on technical departments, and frequent delivery of information or small lots of components from parallel functions or suppliers, sustaining a lean value stream requires near 100 percent engagement from employees, so that when quality problems or process anomalies arise, they respond quickly or call for support. The problem is, in a recent series of Gallup surveys,3 some two-thirds of responding employees reported that they were either âdisengagedâ or âhighly disengagedâ in their work. So while those disengaged will try lean work methods in order keep their jobs, not many are willing to sustain the discipline required to sustain a lean value stream long term. And itâs broadly acknowledged that most middle managers and supervisors consider all improvement programs, including Toyota-style lean operations, as just managementâs âflavors of the month.â So the problem to solve in sustaining lean startups is teaching Western managers a new way of leading, one that gets most everyone engaged. That means, rather than using the force of authority or the authority of expertise, managers must learn a way toengage employees that motivates them to continuously improve the work itself and their own skills. And then a second problem remains: Who will be able to develop these new change leaders? The early Japanese sensei working in American and European factories made leading change look easy. They knew how to develop change leaders because they had been developed the same way by their own sensei years before. In week-long kaizen events, they set direction toward an ideal âwaste-freeâ operation and motivated us Westerners with a special power, one thatâs still a mystery to most in the West. Those early Japanese sensei flew across big oceans andshowed us the way to turn the five keys to a lean business transformation.
Unfortunately, the Sensei Way was lost in translation.
Notes
- The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement, James K. Franz, David Meier and Jeffrey K. Liker, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2011, p. 382.
- Japanese and American Rhetoric: A Contrastive Study, G. Claiborne, Doctoral Dissertation, University of South Florida; cited in Japanese Culture, Roger J. Davies, Tuttle Publishing, 2016, p. 89.
- Factors Driving Record High Employee Engagement in the US, Jim Harter, Gallup Workplace, February 4, 2020. www.Gallup.com
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Chapter 2
Ackoffâs Mess
Every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems. I choose to call such a system a mess.1
Russell L. Ackoff
When the General is entangled in material things and becomes confused and weak, he loses his authority. Then the soldiers under him do not avail themselves of his knowledge but look to themselves alone, and pursue their private plans. And as each one is working for himself, the camp is in disorder, with riots and affrays, and in the end the army meets a disastrous defeat.2
Tengugeijutsu, Chissai
In the Tennessee Plant
At nine oâclock one summer morning, the atmosphere inside the Tennessee plant was already hot and stuffy. The building had neither windows nor air conditioning, and by afternoon, the temperature on the shop floor could reach a hundred degrees. The only fresh air came in through the open doors at the loading docks and hot air only exited through a few roof vents.
At break time, workers walked on dirty, oily floors and arrived at a minuscule canteen or at a trashed, filthy bathroom where writing in the stalls cursed company managers. Walking those same aisles, I saw machine operators standing near inches-deep piles of metal shavings called âchips,â shards that had flown out from open cutting machines. Droplets of cutting oil flew out too and streamed into the piles of chips, forming a heavy metallic sludge that the operator periodically pushed away with a shovel.
Quality was so bad some days that finished parts had to be sold for scrap metal. Why? At times, old equipment couldnât hold an original equipment manufacturerâs modern specifications. At other times, the operator was at fault, sometimes not being mindful of the wear on a cutting insert he might fail to adjust the machine accordingly. On occasion, specifications werenât met because maintenance personnel hadnât performed a scheduled preventative maintenance on a machine. Why not? Most were angry at the plantâs human resources manager, who hated the union and as a result had under-staffed the unionized crafts for years. They, in turn, retaliated by taking extra breaks to smoke a cigarette and talk behind the plant, or even share a joint. Cocaine was rumored to be sold back there too, although no charges were ever filed.
When machines broke down, supervisors told employees to stand around until a maintenance man arrived. If he couldnât fix a machine quickly, employees were told to stack off half-finished parts on line-side pallets. The parts might then be finished on the second shift or failing that, be done the following Saturday or Sunday on overtime. After a few years, supervisorsâ main goal became doing just good enough to get by, to make enough good parts to ship to a customerâs assembly plant by Friday and avoid blame from their boss. Some weeks, a production line fell so far behind that a chartered jet flew a single pallet of its parts to Detroit late Sunday-night to fill line-side racks for final assembly on vehicles the next morning.
Walking the floor one day, I spoke to one woman who was using a broomstick to free up jammed parts on a conveyor beyond her reach. After chatting a bit, I asked her: How long have you been using the broomstick? Her answer was: Seven years. Factory supervisors knew that employees didnât often deserve blame for production problems. One likened getting production out every day to straightening a tangled line on the bottom of his Tennessee fishing boat. He shared with me in private that: Employees arenât bad; theyâre disheartened.
The Tennessee auto-parts plant was built during the economic boom after the Second World War, a unique time now known as âthe golden age of capitalism.â As soldiers returned home and started families, they bought houses, cars, and consumer goods. The American economy grew at over 4 percent per year during the 1950s and at nearly 5 percent throughout the 1960s. The rapid growth boosted corporate profits, which in turn strengthened the bargaining hand of unions, and they negotiated dramatic gains in pay and benefits. As compensation rose for both managers and union employees, an American middle class grew. It was a time when a rising tide in business raised all boats. Yet there was a downside.
Responding to the boom, corporate executives empowered their marketing managers to maximize revenue, and they in turn pushed division and plant managers to increase production beyond their factoryâs proven production capacity and quality capability. When equipment failed, tired employees took extra days off, quality defects were found by inspectors, or production stalled and deliveries became late, operations managers, engineers, and supervisors spent their days and into their nights night fire-fighting machine or quality problems. Inevitably, some of the tired and frustrated managers blamed the employees nearest a machine breakdown or a quality issue, and those workers retaliated by fingering support functions or criticizing a supplier, and many became disengaged from their jobs. Some factories became perpetual-motion machines of wasteful production, poor product quality, management blame, and employee disengagement. It was such a common industrial plight that a famous professor of systems management gave it a name.
Ackoffâs Mess
When I first read the writings of Dr. Russell Ackoff, I felt that Iâd found a kindred spirit. He was a professor emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ackoff was a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking, and management science. He was perhaps the first management expert to drill down and identify that the root problem causing chaotic factory production was the fact that modern corporations had failed to adapt their management approach to a fundamental change in business.
Ackoffâs central idea was that business had entered into a systemâs age, a time when rapid change caused compound, tangled sets of problems, what he christened a âmess.â He wrote that the root problem causing the mess was: âThe search for simple, if not simple-minded solutions to com...
